Volume 34, Number 20 · December 17, 1987
Thoroughly Modern Master
By Martin Filler
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Towards a New Architecture
by Le Corbusier, translated and with an introduction by Frederick Etchells
Dover, 289 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Villas of Le Corbusier: 1920–1930
by Tim Benton
Yale University Press, 224 pp., $50.00
Le Corbusier: Architect of the Century
Catalog of the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London (March 5–June 7, 1987) organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain, 368 pp., $39.95 (paper)
Journey to the East
by Le Corbusier, edited and annotated by Ivan Zaknić, translated by Ivan Zaknić, in collaboration with Nicole Pertuiset
MIT Press, 270 pp., $24.95
The Le Corbusier Guide
by Deborah Gans
Princeton Architectural Press, 192 pp., $17.00 (paper)
Le Corbusier: 5 Projects 26, 1987)
An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (March 26–May
Le Corbusier: Une encyclopédie
Catalog of the exhibition "L'Aventure Le Corbusier: 1887–1965" at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (October 6, 1987–January 3, 1988), edited by Jacques Lucan
Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 497 pp., fr420
Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms
by William J.R. Curtis
Rizzoli, 240 pp., $40.00
Le Corbusier
edited by H. Allen Brooks
Princeton University Press, 267 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Le Corbusier: The City of Refuge, Paris, 1929–1933
by Brian Brace Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 176 pp., $29.00
Pessac de Le Corbusier: 1927–1985, Etude socio-architecturale
by Philippe Boudon, preface by Henri Lefebvre
Paris: Dunod, 208 pp., fr120
Le Corbusier: Early Works by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris
with contributions by Geoffrey Baker, by Jacques Gubler
St. Martin's, 136 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Le Corbusier: La progettazione come mutamento
Catalog of the exhibition at the Università Statale, Milan (December 15, 1986–January 31, 1987), edited by Cesare Blasi, by Gabriella Padovano
Milan: Mazzotta, 263 pp., 35,000L (paper)
Le Corbusier: Pittore e scultore
Catalog of the exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice (September 6–November 30, 1986)
Milan: Mondadori, 212 pp., 35,000L (paper)
Le Corbusier Secret: Dessins et collages de la collection Ahrenberg Lausanne
Catalog of the exhibition at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (April 2–May 10, 1987)
213 pp.
The Decorative Art of Today
by Le Corbusier, translated and introduced by James I. Dunnett
MIT Press, 214 pp., $12.50 (paper)
L'Esprit Nouveau: Le Corbusier und die Industrie, 1920–1925
Catalog of the exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich (March 28–May 10, 1987)
Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 296 pp., DM86
Stars fell on architecture during the 1880s, the decade when most of the central characters of the Modern movement were born. Their centenaries have occasioned an unbroken series of commemorative celebrations and critical reevaluations, but no other observances have approached the scale of those surrounding the hundredth anniversary of the most important Modernist architect of them all: Le Corbusier, born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret on October 7, 1887, in La-Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura. The leading polemicist of the generation that sought to establish a rational aesthetic order out of the unprecedented technical advances of the Age of Industrialization, Le Corbusier defined the Modernist imperative in the most influential of his thirty-eight books, Vers une architecture (first published in 1923, translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture and available once again in a facsimile edition). His language recalls Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's earlier assertion that new materials would give birth to a new age:
Review, 7368 words
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